The tight grunge-lite of Pet Fox—a side quest of sorts for present and former members of present and former Exploding in Sound labelmates Ovlov and Palehound—doesn’t quite align with the band name they’ve chosen for themselves—which, for the record, since I accidentally just googled it, is not an idea worth pursuing (“[domesticated foxes] will either run away from you or attempt to bite your face off,” Popular Science tells me). In place of this fight-or-flight instinct, the Boston-based trio churn out a palatable take on grunge that shaves the edge off while holding onto plenty of that genre’s muscle.
Today they’re revealing news of a follow-up to last year’s punchy More Than Anything EP with the 10-track album A Face in Your Life, due out June 17. While it promises a silver lining somewhere in that track list, the lead single is an instrumentally upbeat examination of the late-capitalist idea of self-serving charity we see everywhere from the tax-break-scheming donation option at nearly any chain store’s checkout counter to the personal encounters we have with individuals whose minds have been warped from living in a society that operates this way.
“The idea of ‘checked off, checked out’ is that someone can quite literally have a checklist that once fulfilled, they can disregard and ‘check out’ so to speak,” the band’s Theo Hartlett explains of the single’s chorus. “There’s so many people that do not give a damn about you until they realize that you hold some sort of worth that is valuable or cool to them.”
Check out the track below, and anticipate news of an East Coast tour in the near future. In the meantime you can catch Hartlett behind the drums on tour with Momma.
